You Pretend Not to See
Dedicated to Stephen King, '' ''the first of those few who taught me to respect my abilities, '' ''rather than to fear them. Once my family lived in Jacksonville, Florida. We lived way out in the woods almost, and if I remember right, the road was literally made out of dirt. It was a hot summer day, and my Dad and I were just outside the door, in the shade, talking about something; probably the big snake that had been in the back yard just beside the house, but that's a different story. We were talking, and then this really weird feeling came over me. It was like someone had busted open a big water-balloon inside my head, and all I could feel was this sudden rush of cold, clear water, like you might get if you let the tap run until it couldn't get any colder. Then it started finally to have a place and a time outside my head. I had to interrupt my Dad, and I looked toward the bend in the road, with just a little bit of hill to it; you couldn't possibly see anything on the other side, but I knew there was a dog coming. The dog, just a puppy really, came trotting over the hill and around the bend, and I said, "Doggy thirsty.", which was really far too childish an utterance for me, more like a two-year-old than the five or six that I was. My Dad, knowing I hadn't seen a dog before, told me, "That's a dog. Dogs have four legs." and I was really thrown for a curve by that, trying to see having two more legs. My Dad sort of pretended not to see, and then went to get a closer look at the puppy. He told me to stay where I was, and I did. The neighbor right across the street from us came up to the road, and I could see, and just sort of hear, him and Dad talking about the puppy. I watched Dad kneel down and pet him, while our neighbor went back toward his house. I really, really, really wanted to go over and pet the puppy too, but I did as I had been told, and the shade was really kind of nice too, anyway. Then our neighbor came back to the road with about the shiniest piece of metal I had ever seen, and the sun glared off of it like it was the Sun itself, right there, stuck on the side of it. He set it down on the ground, and the puppy practically jumped on top of it. Later that day, the man who lived down the street, around the bend, over the hill, came to talk to me and my Dad. The man seemed angry at me, and my Dad seemed kind of worried, which had never been his usual mood. I don't exactly remember all that we said to each other, and I was mostly asking innocent and kind of childish questions, and he just kept getting more and more irritated. Much later in my life, when I remembered this whole scene, I finally ended up saying to him, "My Dad isn't worried about what you might do to me; he's worried about what I might end up doing to you. He's not here to protect me, he's sitting here with us to protect you – from yourself." He turned to my Dad and asked a question, and my Dad seemed to answer with some variation of a "yes". So now you have some pretty good guesses about what happened to the snake, right? I've thought for the longest time that the people around me were prisoners of a world that they simply couldn't even see, but now that seems like only half the answer; they're also prisoners of a world that is always before them, plain as day, but they're always deeply afraid to say anything that might give away that they do see it. I've never really been able to bring myself to give a damn, and frankly, I'm sick of pretending to even try. I do hope you enjoyed the story though. Are you ready to stop pretending, and see? Not yet? Then when? Category:"True story."